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Hello and welcome!

My name is Michelle and I have a passion for sharing information related to acupuncture and connecting people who love acupuncture. I’m an acupuncturist with a different kind of view on things – I love the marketing and practice management aspect of being an acupuncturist. Or rather, I should say that I did, when I was in private practice. More on that later, of course.

What is the purpose of this blog?

By and large, the purpose of this blog is 1) to share tips and advice (from my own experience and through interviewing other acupuncturists) on the difficult and ever-evolving topic of acupuncture practice management, and 2) to emphasize that we have an incredible, supportive resource in each other as fellow acupuncturists.

Tips and advice on the difficult and ever-evolving topic of acupuncture practice management.

Owning and running a business is hard to escape in the practice of acupuncture in this country, and it is often much more complicated than most people anticipate. For many of us, when we were students imagining ourselves as future acupuncturists, our thoughts revolved mostly around helping people heal, and we didn’t take very seriously the concept that we would have to run a business. We thought it would be easy, that patients would just find us and walk through our doors. But running a business is something to take very seriously (especially if we want to eat), and business management has evolved over time.

In today’s modern world, running a business means knowing where to put our advertising and marketing budget, and when, and how much to spend. It means networking. It means being internet literate and of course, very social media savvy. It means having a consistent brand for your business, and projecting the image of a professional medical practitioner. Most of us know all of this is necessary, but need a little help with how to go about it. That’s what this blog is here for.

To help give acupuncturists (and students of acupuncture) a sense of community and camaraderie as a group of united practitioners.

We have so much to share with each other. As they always say in regards to scholarly research, we stand on the shoulders of giants. We use the scholarship and honed experience of thousands of years of clinical practice to guide the way we use traditional Chinese medicine – why not use the accumulated experience of our colleagues and peers to help us find our path in regards to practice management in the modern world?

To this end, I’ll interview a wide variety of acupuncturists about the paths they have taken, their special areas of expertise (their passions) and the advice they would give to budding acupuncturists.

I feel really strongly (and I believe I’m not the only one) that we should consider our fellow acupuncturists to be a support network, not the competition. Who else can we ask about Liver qi stagnation, or difficult cases, or how to bill insurance for acupuncture codes? Let’s cultivate a united community of supportive practitioners, not only for our own personal benefit as individual practitioners, but also for the benefit of promoting acupuncture in general.

We are part of an incredible, unique group of people who give of themselves every day – in treating and helping others heal themselves, in studying and practicing an ancient medicine that spans thousands of years and crosses numerous cultures. We carry on a legacy of healing, caring, and scholarship that is 2500 years old, at least. I think that as practitioners, we all have, or have had at some point, burning questions about how to manage an ancient, ever-evolving, and generally “foreign” medicine in our country: how to make it accessible and understandable to our modern patients, whether or not we’re running our businesses correctly, and whether we are serving patients as well as we possibly can.

Let’s ask these questions together, and find answers!

Michelle

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